Domestic governments have
responsibility to regulate market activity to prevent some morally bad
outcomes, and to meet legitimate international standards such as human rights. There are cases in which domestic governments
are clearly not meeting their responsibility to regulate market activity. These
include cases where relevant domestic laws have not been passed, or where
relevant laws exist but are not successfully implemented. Ineffective or
non-existent regulation of labor and environmental standards in developing
countries provide a good example. In such cases, we can ask who else should be
assigned default responsibility to
prevent the morally bad outcomes. One possible set of agents are the market
actors that profit from and often contribute to the failure to regulate. The
popular and academic literature often turns to consumers of the goods produced
under such conditions as responsibility-bearers in the face of failures of regulation.
Are consumers really an appropriate group to be asked to step in? What are the
other candidate groups or
institutions, and under what conditions would it be more appropriate for
default responsibility to be distributed to them? Who should oversee such a
distribution of responsibility?